Authors:Hanß S.Pages: 495 - 524Abstract: This article explores the interrelated notions of time and the self in sixteenth-century Augsburg. It focuses on Veit Konrad Schwarz, a young Augsburg patrician, and his ‘Little Book of Clothes’ (1561). Veit circumvented the invisibility of time by making the material culture of temporality an essential part of his self-representation. The visual representation of timing the self was a significant skill, and self-narratives such as Veit’s served to represent a person’s connoisseurship in managing time. The article adopts a twofold approach to the inter-relationship of self and time during the early modern period. First, genitures, horoscopes and birthdays are shown to have been significant for the representation of notions of time and practices of dating. Birth-referential timing shaped understandings of life and personhood within early modern groups. Secondly, by examining how Veit addressed both missed and anticipated moments in his manuscript’s key narrative about the transition of a youth into a man, the article shows that managing a proper balance between moments and timespans served to demonstrate a person’s proficiency in recognizing moments that were appropriate for action, for description and for illustration.PubDate: 2017-10-20DOI: 10.1093/gerhis/ghx105Issue No:Vol. 35, No. 4 (2017)

Authors:Heinzen J.Pages: 525 - 550Abstract: The German War of 1866 was a turning point in the consolidation of Prussian hegemony over the emerging German nation-state. This article engages with a neglected aspect of this process by investigating the destabilizing effect of Prussia’s territorial expansion at the expense of fellow monarchies in Hanover, Hessen-Kassel, Nassau and Schleswig-Holstein. It argues that the hostile response of ruling houses related to the deposed dynasties and the disapprobation of legitimists at home placed the Hohenzollerns in a difficult position, as they often found themselves caught between the informal yet palpable pressure of Europe’s ‘Royal International’ and the policies pursued by their chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. To escape this dilemma, King (from 1871 onwards Kaiser) Wilhelm and his successors sought to bring about a reconciliation with the alienated dynasties through treaty settlements, intermarriage and the appropriation of their rivals’ symbolic capital in public speech acts. The way in which the Hohenzollerns courted their detractors betrayed a versatility that scholarship on the Prussian cult of monarchy has yet to fully appreciate. In fact, the Hohenzollern court’s long-term preoccupation with sectional reconciliation reveals much not only about royal diplomacy in the second half of the nineteenth century but also about the workings of Germany’s monarchocentric federal edifice and the role of civic initiative in the promotion of monarchical legitimacy.PubDate: 2017-09-28DOI: 10.1093/gerhis/ghx103Issue No:Vol. 35, No. 4 (2017)

Authors:Walther D.Pages: 551 - 567Abstract: According to Norbert Elias, the path towards civilization was marked by a change in what became acceptable and unacceptable and by who was associated with each category. This process included appropriate ways and places to defecate and urinate. Such practices became tied to notions of ‘dirt,’ a concept Mary Douglas equated with anything that challenged norms used to promote social stability. Increasingly, human-waste elimination became associated with offences against modern bourgeois sensibilities of proper behaviour and cleanliness and hence ‘civilized’ society. Technological advances, scientific knowledge and bourgeois norms were deployed to address these ‘offensive’ acts by removing them from public view and to justify these actions. In the colonial setting, the disposal of human waste was therefore not only a technical question, but also closely connected to European notions of civilization. There colonial physicians worked to supplant the ‘dirty’ practices of these ‘natural’ peoples and the spaces they inhabited through the use of technology and medico-scientific, bourgeois discourses. Doctors utilized educational, surveillance and punitive strategies to supplant indigenous cultural codes of toileting with German understandings of how to ‘properly’ use these technologies. However, African and Pacific Islander patterns and understandings of toileting continued to challenge German notions of cleanliness and civilization. Ultimately, doctors justified the further colonization of the landscape and indigenous bodies precisely because the latter challenged German notions of hygienic order.PubDate: 2017-10-05DOI: 10.1093/gerhis/ghx102Issue No:Vol. 35, No. 4 (2017)

Authors:Fisher G.Pages: 568 - 587Abstract: This article explores the experiences of ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe as they rebuilt their lives and their homes in West Germany after the Second World War. It concentrates on the case of the Heimstättensiedlung, a residential area of a few thousand pesople located near Darmstadt, in the region of Hesse. Built as a settlement for the unemployed in the aftermath of the Great Depression, after the war the Heimstättensiedlung welcomed several hundred families of ethnic Germans from Hungary and Romania (Bukovina). Focusing on the presence of these Hungarian Germans and Bukovina Germans in this mixed settlement, which brought together ‘old’ and ‘new’ settlers, this article considers the shifting politics of reconstruction, identity and memory surrounding their ‘integration’. It adopts a long-term perspective (from 1945 to the present) and examines the approaches of politicians, community leaders and individuals. In so doing, it shows that the position of ethnic Germans was highly ambivalent, predicated on the claim to belong ‘as Germans among Germans’ and, at the same time, the right to be different. The case of these ethnic Germans shows that continuities in the understanding of community after 1945 and the grounding of postwar identity in past practices and narratives meant the centrality of Germanness to belonging in West Germany was reaffirmed rather than challenged. This remained the case after their experiences were ethically recoded in accordance with an assimilationist concept of integration. This article thus questions the value of this historical precedent for contemporary discussions of immigration.PubDate: 2017-09-28DOI: 10.1093/gerhis/ghx101Issue No:Vol. 35, No. 4 (2017)

Pages: 588 - 602Abstract: The term Enlightenment (or Aufklärung) remains heavily contested. Even when historians delimit the remit of the concept, assigning it to a particular historical period rather than to an intellectual or moral programme, the public resonance of the Enlightenment remains high and problematic—especially when equated in an essentialist manner with modernity or some core values of ‘the West’. This Forum has been convened to discuss recent research on the Enlightenment in Germany, different views of the term and its ideological use in public discourse outside academia (and sometimes within it).PubDate: 2017-09-26DOI: 10.1093/gerhis/ghx104Issue No:Vol. 35, No. 4 (2017)

Authors:Haschemi Yekani M; Schaper U.Pages: 603 - 623Abstract: This review article considers recent works that take a cultural-historical approach to German colonialism. A number of the books place colonialism in the specific context of Imperial Germany. Mass-cultural visual representations of the colonies and colonized helped shape a ‘popular colonialism’ that continued to develop well beyond Germany’s loss of its colonies after the First World War. Research into colonial knowledge in Imperial Germany—focusing on themes such as networks, actors, directionality, ignorance and masculinity—is providing a more layered understanding of constructions of difference. The colonial space itself is addressed in works that raise the porous and unstable nature of the German colonial order, with attention being given to the agency of the colonized in varied forms that might transcend the temporal boundaries of German colonial rule. Additionally, the adoption of a broader transnational approach has brought a wider focus that allows migratory bodies and entangled ideas, for example, to be identified. The review article recognizes and commends the multifold challenges to the spatial and temporal conventions of German colonial historiography.PubDate: 2017-11-14DOI: 10.1093/gerhis/ghx106Issue No:Vol. 35, No. 4 (2017)